Above all else, it's the best M83 record yet.

"Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion.

Throughout the album, Yorke’s everyday enlightenment is backed by music of expanse and abandon. The guitars sound like pianos, the pianos sound like guitars, and the mixes breathe with pastoral calm.

While there's no question that Grizzly Bear's last two records have sounded gorgeous, critics of the band have wondered if that's enough. Shields, the band's fourth and most compositionally adventurous record, should put those concerns to bed.

While Quality may lack the basement charms of [departed producer DJ Hi-]Tek's finest, it more than compensates by employing a funkier and more upbeat sound palate to further draw out the nuances of what is already one of the most rounded and complete rap personas in the game.

You get the sense, maybe, that Tumor is carrying around other people’s secrets, and that Safe in the Hands of Love is so cavernous-sounding, in part, to accommodate them. Holding all of this together is a stew of feelings—dread, sensuousness, ecstasy, terror--that melt into a mood so pungent and pervasive that people who grew up inside all kinds of different music will be beckoned towards it. Ambient electronic, dream-pop, experimental noise, ’90s R&B, even late-’90s alt-rock--Tumor’s music is fluid and generous enough to contain it all.

It seems unlikely that Monk and his quartet would have known about what was happening in East Palo Alto, but they’ve clearly been buoyed by the crowd’s youthful energy, and they deliver some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of their core repertoire in response.

Fake Train and New Plastic Ideas hold important places in the history of 90s music, not to mention those of punk and indie as a whole. And they set the tone for unimagined Unwound greatness to come (which will be chronicled in subsequent volumes of the box-set series). But those two albums, and the tracks that accompany them on Rat Conspiracy, transcend time, place, attitude, and even the sprawling continuum of influence.

Without a doubt, this is Les Savy Fav's defining album.

None of Smith's previous records-- and in fact, very few indie releases this year-- have flat-out rocked like this one, with blaring trumpets signaling snares to exact their force beneath sweeping multitracked vocal choruses that simply won't stop crescendoing.

Throughout Cedars, Clearlake continually find beauty in melancholy and melancholy behind beauty, while raising your hairs in reverence with occasional guitar squalls.

Some of the most propulsive, ferocious music of the year as well as some of the most poignant.

Nothing is rushed, but nothing is lingered over for too long, either. And as gorgeous as Shepherd’s music and arrangements are, I keep circling back to Sanders, his horn now quieter but just as emotionally powerful as when he wielded it alongside John Coltrane at age 25. ... On this piece, a clear late-career masterpiece, it’s saying plenty.

For those who've been following along for a few years, this is a groundbreaking record that condenses and amplifies Ariel Pink's most accessible tendencies. But the brilliant thing about Before Today is that no prior knowledge of his catalog is required.

What follows is surprisingly full and wide ranging, almost as much as the Bruegel painting that graces the album's cover.

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is both vast and packed with detail. The songs expand and contract, one minute blasting open with the melodrama of a Roy Orbison ballad, the next zooming in with surgical detail as Hadreas describes ribs that fold like fabric, a tear-streaked face, an instance of post-coital petty theft.

Along with wry, sometimes melancholic observations worthy of Richman or the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, these elements make for Lekman's best record, one likely to captivate even those who were skeptical of his previous releases.

[The “Underdubbed” version is] not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. .... Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades.

We can only hope that, as we enter the 2010s, Embryonic portends yet another new phase for the Flaming Lips--one that's equally as improbable and rewarding as the ones that have preceded it.

An immediately engrossing and challenging collection of moody, evocative songs-- an entire album of "I Want You" and "Watching the Detectives" for those so inclined.

Revisiting All Hail West Texas over two decades into the Mountain Goats’ existence makes a central irony in their story all too clear: it’s not a lonely record anymore. A handful of these songs remain the most iconic in the Mountain Goats catalog.

Feels is an excellent record, one that, despite a more conventional approach, happens to get better over time.

Every moment feels lush and welcoming, designed to reach as many people as possible.

The first three discs of The Smithsonian Folkways Collection are as fine a retrospective as you can find for Lead Belly, showcasing the diversity of his repertoire and the precision of his playing and singing. What distinguishes this collection is its scope.

Even in unvarnished recordings, some of the earliest tracks here--the innocent teen angst of Hart’s “Can’t See You Anymore” and “Sore Eyes,” the handclap-abetted “The Truth Hurts,” and Mould’s studio outtake “Writer’s Cramp”--show an attention to and ease with pop songcraft that later became a hallmark. ... By the time the set gets to the 1983 studio debut Everything Falls Apart, it’s a little like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor.

We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service is all just beats, rhymes, and life. Nothing about this feels like a legacy cash-in; it feels like a legit A Tribe Called Quest album.

White Blood Cells doesn't veer far from the formula of past White Stripes records; all are tense, sparse and jagged. But it's here that they've finally come into their own, where Jack and Meg White finally seem not only comfortable with the path they've chosen, but practiced, precise and able to convey the deepest sentiment in a single bound.

Here, Clark's role-playing is grounded in emotions that are as cryptic as they are genuine and affecting. And when her voice can't bear it, her guitar does the screaming.